Many modern storage systems provide extensive value-added features for its customers. These features can provide significant value to those customers who are actively using the features; however, they come with performance overhead costs for those customers who are not actively using the features. For example, features such as synchronous replication, Quality of Service, or online system checkpoint, require that the system perform checks to determine whether the feature is enabled and active for every data update request entering the system, regardless of whether the storage unit the request is written to has the feature configured/enabled or not. In high performance storage systems with lots of feature capability, such as XtremIO products by Dell® of Hopkinton, Mass., this presents a potential risk during failure recovery. For example, data modules are unable to service input/output (IO) requests until all feature-related configurations become available during module restart.